Shadow-bound
by Elesianne
Summary: Aredhel didn't truly love the gleaming white of Gondolin that tried too much to be like Tirion, and felt like a bright cage; but her new home in Nan Elmoth grows darker over the years, shadows gathering close around her.


_**Some keywords for this fic: **__family, dysfunctional relationships, light angst_

_**Word count**__: ~2,100_

_**A/N:**_ This is an introspective piece about Aredhel's conflicting, changing feelings towards her husband and their forest home.

I might write another fic one day about the joys Aredhel finds early in her and Eöl's relationship – this fic deals more with what is there besides the joy.

* * *

**Shadow-bound**

Aredhel thinks more of her mother after she becomes a mother herself than she has thought of her for the centuries that have passed since they parted.

She still doesn't forgive Anairë for not coming along, but she begins to think that one day she will at least understand her. She hopes she will; that hope of it is new too.

* * *

She thinks of her mother when she gives her son a name. The mother-name of Aredhel's son is given in very different circumstances from the giving of her own mother-name. There is no grand feast, no large, joyful family witnessing the naming; there is not even a father-name for the child to abandon in favour of the new name if they so wish. There is not even the sound of the new name spoken.

Eöl loves her son, Aredhel knows it with all the conviction she ever had about anything, and he loves her, but he would not accept this name from her for their son, so Aredhel gives the name in her heart.

Thus there is only the ever-twilight of Nan Elmoth surrounding Aredhel and her dark-eyed child, the twilight that she names him for, in the language of her own people that has been forbidden both by the king in Doriath and by her own husband.

The half-light, half-darkness of the forest is not yet distasteful to her yet when she names her son Lómion, child of the twilight.

Lómion's eyes, darker though they are than Noldor-grey, remind her of her mother's. Anairë always could tell when any of her children were lying, and many other things about people besides, and already before Lómion is the height of her knee, Aredhel often has the feeling that he sees things that she believed to have hidden from his view.

Eöl, too, has a piercing way of looking at people, but for some reason Aredhel prefers to think that Lómion inherited at least some of his uncanny perceptiveness from her mother too.

Motherhood has made her silly and made her miss her own mother after centuries of separation, Aredhel tells herself. She certainly doesn't miss all the constraints Anairë always tried to put on her, to behave this way and not do that, nor does she miss the way Turgon tried to do the same.

She still isn't certain why she went with him to his hidden city. For Idril, perhaps. Or just for something new to experience.

She has always had a tendency to make decisions based on first, intuitive feelings, and then to try not examine her motivations too much later. It is perhaps a quality of her family, she thinks wryly to herself sometimes, one that has served them well in some matters and worse in others.

She is not certain whether she would recognise the taste of regret in her mouth.

* * *

As Lómion – or Maeglin as his father names him when he has been nameless but in his mother's heart for too long – grows, he has ill dreams sometimes. They make him pale in the wrong way in the morning, and his mother's heart constrict with worry. For even when he doesn't tell her – and he usually does not – she knows that he finds the path of rest difficult only when he has had a disagreement with his father.

On those mornings, Aredhel finds herself growing weary too. She is growing weary and sick of the shadows that surround them, weary of having to wait for starlight, weary of the sternness and silence of her husband that once seemed so enchanting to her. Weary of the servants, the only people in their forest besides her tiny family, of their clipped words and smiles that when they appear are always secretive, and never for her. Sometimes she thinks they are at her expense.

The servants are more loyal to Eöl than her, but she knows they are a little afraid of her when she wants them to be: afraid of her sharp tongue and the light in her eyes. It makes her laugh sometimes that these people should be afraid of light, when light is the most beautiful thing there is.

She does not hope for the servants' love but for their respect, the kind that her mother commanded among her household. If she cannot have that, she will make do with occasional fear.

* * *

Lómion is an ever-greater joy to her as he grows. She had not realised how much she has missed the sun until they ride out of the oppressive eaves of Nan Elmoth when Eöl is gone on one of his journeys and has refused to take Lómion with him this time. The joy on Lómion's face adds to hers, and she laughs out loud as they race to the river Celon together. They spend the afternoon on the river's shore, splashing in the cold water and then drying out in the sun and the fresh breeze that blows from north-west across the plain of Himlad.

When they return, the trees seem taller than ever to Aredhel, their shadows more suffocating. The peculiar quality of half-light that she admired in her earlier years here seems less beautiful now. There is a small voice in the back of her head that tells her to turn back to the sun, the light of it now fading into dusk but still warm, to ride hard and leave the shadows behind.

Instead she takes her son home and tells him stories of the glory of the Trees, of how their light was more fair and more holy than the sun, and of how her family with their people came to this land to avenge the death of that light.

Lómion listens like he always does, still and attentive but not spellbound. When she speaks of the Noldor to him, he seems very Noldor to her, his eyes shining, his ink-dark hair just like that of Aredhel's father and grandfather.

Though her relationship with Eöl and the ever-twilight of their home grows more complicated as the years pass, she knows that even if she were capable of regret, she could never regret coming here and having Lómion. The hard, glinting flint of his eyes is dear to her beoynd the worth of all the jewels her father or brothers or husband ever gave her.

When Lómion was too small for Eöl to take him with him to his meetings with the dwarves, Aredhel sang Quenya lullabies to him out loud, above the whisper she usually had to limit herself to, and in those moments she felt uncommonly at peace with everything.

* * *

Aredhel always counts days when her husband and son are gone. She misses them, and looks forward to their return. Her days alone with just the dour servants for company are too quiet.

When Lómion stays home with her, as happens more and more as he nears adulthood, she still counts the days her husband is gone. She is never quite certain whether she does it because she looks forward to his return or dreads it.

As long as she is certain that he cannot return yet, not this soon, she asks Lómion to come riding with her almost every day, and they ride to meet the sun. Whether for a moment, or for the whole day, they make their way out of the shadows and let their eyes adjust to the light and enjoy together the simple delight of riding in the sun and the breeze. The wind is always fresh and cool here on the edge of a plain, whether of the plain of Himlad or of Estolad.

Eöl and Aredhel taught Lómion together to ride among the trees of the forest. Alone, Aredhel teaches him how to ride hard against the wind. She always felt best like that, on the saddle, in the middle of wide openness, all paths open to her.

Perhaps it is natural, for the sake of contrast between her living environments in the palaces of Tirion and the hidden valley of Tumladen and the house surrounded by the trees of Nan Elmoth, those tightly constrained spaces.

* * *

Aredhel believes, still, somewhere in her heart, that Eöl loves her son even now that he is grown almost as tall as he is and more independent of thought besides, but the way he loves him makes her heart uneasy. It makes it more difficult to be loving of Eöl, too.

It makes her think of families and of how complicated they are. When Lómion was born she thought that they would be a different kind of a family from her own – small, and free of entanglements with the wider world – but it seems that that was nothing but a passing dream.

Aredhel thinks of her mother again. Anairë had been a steadfast supporter of her husband as long as Fingolfin opposed Fëanor but after he swore to follow his half-brother, she told him she would not follow him, not even for the sake of her children.

There is a snapping point for us all, Aredhel thinks. A point where we have to choose sides for all time.

As she bids goodbye to her husband as he once again leaves to meet with the dwarves, Lómion standing beside her silent, sullen, staying with her again – she thinks that she can feel tension growing soon to the point that something must snap.

She thinks that she will stand by Lómion's side on that day too.

It is a miserable, rainy autumn day and after Eöl rides off, Aredhel goes back inside, tells the servants to build a fire. Then she tells them to go to their own cottages, and she tells Lómion stories of the Noldor, of their splendour and spirit.

It is always good to spend time alone with her son, but in the evening her spirit chafes at going to bed after a day of inactivity. She resolves to go for a vigorous ride tomorrow, to ride as fast as she can among the trees and out to the plains, even if it rains.

Making the decision doesn't help her find rest and after an hour of two of futile trying she goes, quietly as she can, to her son's room to see if he is sleeping well. Lómion is too old for such checks, she knows, but there had been ill feeling between son and father in the morning, and Aredhel is worried.

She finds him tossing and turning in his bed though asleep. He doesn't wake when she pulls up a chair next to his bed, where she can see both her son and the hazy moonlit sky covered in tattered clouds through the window.

She starts quietly singing to comfort him, choosing a song written in the old language of her people in Gondolin in the earliest days of the city when Thingol of Doriath had not yet outlawed Quenya. It is a song about night falling in the hidden city: of street-lamps being lit and torches carried in the white streets, of nightingales singing above the sound of flowing fountains, of an evening feast in the palace. She has not sung this song since she left the city. For a long time she believed she truly did not miss the things in the song.

These days, the way she feels about having left safety and the bounds of her brother's hidden city is too complicated to put into words.

Or perhaps she just doesn't dare to.

She stays there on the hard wooden chair for much of the night, first singing, then just listening to her son's breathing. She watches the light outside, and inside the dark-walled room, barely change as the moon climbs to his peak and then begins his descent.

When the stars begin to fade she sweeps back the hair from her son's face – he looks serious even in his sleep – and goes to her own bed. It is cold and too large when Eöl is gone, but it is easier to fall asleep there all the same.

Her bed in Gondolin was too cold and large too, and the stark-white walls had crawled with night-shadows from the tall trees outside her chambers. She had hated those trees.

Here her walls are shadow-dark all over, like her son's, and there is no light before the dim sunrise.


End file.
